4 Comments

It's not amazing that finance is dragging down the economy and threatening the survival of the human race.

It's amazing that anyone ever believed that finance could do anything else. Usury, in our case compound interest on all economic activity by financial elites, was known to be a destructive force by the time of Moses. That's why it's banned in the Torah. After 3500 years of intellectual and moral devolution we seem to have forgotten that lesson in spite of reminders by Aristotle, Jesus, Mohammed and many others.

"By plowing cash into stock buybacks rather than productive assets, such as factories or IT equipment or systems that might be a little more difficult to hack into or even (God forbid) workers, corporations are inserting their own neck into a stranglehold that will continue to crimp revenue growth. But short-term, it performs a nose job on earnings per share.

"A valiant strategy in an era when central-bank money printing and interest rate repression has surgically separated reality from stock prices. In this manner, the doctored EPS growth – and particularly the “expected” doctored EPS growth for distant future quarters, which invariably is in the double digits – is bandied about as illusory justification for the gravity-defying ascent of stocks."